Closing Europe: a European U-turn in migration policy

This change of perspective became obvious at the EU summit in Brussels held on October 17, where it became clear to the outside world that the majority of European leaders are now not as supportive to migration as Viktor Orbán is trying to portray them. Although Hungarian government communications threaten to "transfer the migrants to Brussels by buses", this Brussels is not the environment it used to be and how the Hungarian administration wants to depict it. 

In the midst of a paradigm shift 

Although prior to the summit, the Hungarian Prime Minister had predicted another migration battle, the fact that the event was planned to be two days long, but it already ended on its first day, is telling. The meeting was concluded with von der Leyen’s announcement that the European Commission is proposing new legislation to facilitate the deportation of illegal immigrants. 

And this is just one element of the proposals. Others include closed, guarded reception centres at borders, further closure of external borders, rethinking the concept of safe third countries, and suspending asylum rights in the event of an 'external hybrid attack.' EU leaders have accepted without reservations that Tusk is essentially closing Poland from refugees by invoking the latter. 

Most of this is only a draft, and many conflicts of interest between member states would still need to be addressed. The EU's spring migration deal, agreed just a few months ago after years of tough negotiations, has shown that the divisions are essentially irresolvable: it is very difficult to reach a compromise under the current system between southern European frontline states facing a large influx, and the richer northern countries, which are burdened by the most asylum applications, and eastern European countries. 

The situation would change, of course, if there were fewer asylum seekers arriving in Europe. But in order to achieve this, the EU would have to abandon some of its current principles, meanwhile pretending that they remain valid through policy reforms. 

The proposals now being put forward at Commission level, however, represent a gradual but fundamental change: breaking up with an approach to asylum that has been cracking in practice, meanwhile still trying to invoke human rights in words but being increasingly subordinated to security concerns. 

The centre-right gets tough 

In many cases, the change has been initiated by politicians coming from the people’s parties, who were labelled by the Hungarian government as migrant-friendly, from Scandinavia to Germany and France. Of course, a decisive role in this was played by the smaller-than-expected but nevertheless significant advance of the far right in the European Parliamentary elections in June, as well as in several national parliamentary elections. In the past year, the party of Orbán's old ally, Geert Wilders, has come to power in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party of Austria has also won the elections, and alarms has been raised by Le Pen's advance in France and the success of the AFD in the German Länder elections. 

In two of the EU's most important countries, France and Germany, a major clampdown on immigration is now simultaneously on the agenda. 

In Germany, three people were killed and several others seriously injured by a knife-wielding attacker in Solingen at the end of August. The perpetrator was a rejected Syrian asylum seeker who should have been removed from the country earlier, but the authorities made little effort to do so. The attack gave a new boost to the popularity of the far-right, prompting the Scholz-cabinet to introduce temporary border controls at all German borders. Some say this means that the Schengen system is practically not operating anymore. 

CDU, which leads in opinion polls, has called for a tightening of migration policy and the swift and effective deportation of rejected applicants. The Scholz-led coalition has also promised to do so, with a somewhat watered-down package of laws passed by the Bundestag on October 18: restricting the use of weapons and financial support for asylum seekers and expanding the powers of security forces. 

The French dynamics are similar to the German in a sense that the rise of the radical right has forced the political centre to take action. 

While a broad coalition worked against the National Rally in the second round, the fact that one in three French people voted for Le Pen has created a new situation. 

In the new government, which was formed after a long ordeal, the post of Interior Minister went to Bruno Retailleau, who had long called for a tightening of the migration rules from the centre-right Republican Party. The French Minister of the Interior has since announced that he will propose a new immigration law. He wants to extend the detention of illegal immigrants, limit the possibility of family reunification and significantly increase the number of deportations. 

Speculation has also been rife that the traditional principle of jus soli in French nationality law, whereby children born on French territory - including those of non-French immigrants - can automatically acquire French nationality when they reach adulthood, might be abolished. 

Outsourced asylum policy 

Introducing such changes will not be easy: the Constitutional Council in Paris already rejected a few similar restrictions last year. But Retailleau is already being considered to represent a paradigm shift in migration. In Europe both Viktor Orbán and Geert Wilders speak highly of the French Interior Minister. 

The most advanced shift in migration policy is taking place in Italy. For the Meloni government, which came to power two years ago, one of the most important priorities during the campaign was to curb immigration. The number of immigrants arriving through Italy have since fallen by 60 per cent, partly thanks to the more effective action by the European border agency, Frontex, in the Mediterranean and partly to the strategy of making Tunisia interested in limiting departures. 

As a result, this migration route is now less popular, although this is not necessarily a solution on a European level: the route has simply shifted westwards, with more people arriving through the Atlantic Ocean to the Canary Islands, increasing social and political tensions in Spain. 

But the Italian measure that is currently receiving the most attention in Europe is the exportation of asylum policy. The first asylum seekers deported from Italian territorial waters arrived in Albania this week. For them, two large, closed refugee camps have been built in Albania with Italian money. Based on the two countries’ deal, those people will (should?) be transported to the Albanian camps who were picked up from boats on the Mediterranean and who had previously been mainly shipped to Lampedusa and from there to the Italian mainland. In return for Albania’s cooperation Tirana will receive development aid and Italian support for their EU accession, although the latter has not been officially declared. 

While in the 1990s Albanians arrived in rubber boats by the tens of thousands through the Otranto Strait to Italy, now Italian warships would transport people picked up from ships on the Mediterranean to the opposite direction, only to be repatriated after a few weeks. 

The Italian-Albanian deal has many critics, from refugee aid organisations to those who have criticised the cost of the deal, which has risen to €1 billion over five years. The process however, already seems to be collapsing. The first 16 asylum seekers who have been transferred to Albania will definitely have to be returned to Italy: four of them turned out to be under 18, as determined by biological tests, while the fate of the others was decided by an Italian court on Friday.

The reason for this is that under the Italian-Albanian agreement, the Italians can only take those people to Albania who come from officially safe countries and only until their asylum application is processed. However, a recent precedent ruling by the European Court of Justice has radically narrowed the list of safe countries, so countries such as Egypt, Tunisia or Bangladesh no longer count as safe - the latter being the country from which most immigrants have recently come to Italy. 

Blackmail potential without human rights concerns 

The court decision requires the entire first and second Albanian contingent to be returned to Italy. Meloni reacted by accusing the judges of political bias. But she is not the only one negatively affected by the ruling, as these days Meloni's experiment is being watched attentively all over Europe, with several countries considering similar arrangements. In the middle of October, Commission President Von der Leyen also indicated that when the European asylum issue is reviewed, the Italian solution will be studied intensively. 

The European Union's strong shift towards a tightening of migration rules is most evident in this externalisation of asylum policy. Previously, EU leaders have strongly rejected this approach, and even two years ago they strongly criticised Britain for wanting to outsource its refugee problem to Rwanda. 

In comparison, this is now the recipe that a number of Member States are considering. 

Most recently, the right-wing Dutch government announced that they want to send asylum seekers arriving in the Netherlands to Uganda. The French government is also studying how the Italian model could be adopted. The Germans are not there yet, but they are negotiating with Uzbekistan about the possible deportation of rejected asylum seekers: they would take there Afghans who have been deported from Germany, as they are not willing to negotiate directly with the Taliban, while the Uzbeks have contacts with them. Chancellor Scholz's trip to Istanbul in October fits into this framework: he was discussing with Erdogan, among other things, how Turkey could facilitate the readmission of Kurdish asylum seekers rejected in Germany. 

Although the situation of asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be processed and those already rejected is very different, what they have in common is that a growing number of European politicians want to defuse tensions over migration by trying to manage the whole problem away from the continent. Their hope is that this would not only lead to fewer arrivals (and shorter stays for those refused), but also to fewer departures in the first place: the difficulty of obtaining refugee status would reduce the number of people trying to leave, and thus the migratory pressure on Europe would also ease. 

The Commission's two other proposals aim to do the same: first, to keep asylum seekers in closed reception centres if possible, and second, to achieve tougher action from the sending and transit countries. To this end, they seek to broaden their cooperation with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Senegal, Mauritania, and they would even negotiate with pro-Russian, coup-ruled Mali. 

There is also an acute political game going on with Morocco, which in itself shows the risks of similar deals. In 2021, thousands of migrants swam and crawled from Morocco to North-African Ceuta belonging to Spain, presumably with the active help of Moroccan border guards. At stake in the political blackmail was the fate of Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and the relationship with the Polisario Front fighting against the occupation. Since then, Morocco has tied the curbing of migration flowing through Morocco to the acceptance of its rule over Western Sahara. 

They didn't invent this technique, it is enough to think about Turkey in this regard. In 2016, the EU signed a comprehensive migration agreement with Ankara, which resulted in the decrease of migration pressure on Europe, while 3.5 million Syrian refugees got stranded in Turkey. Erdogan has used the gatekeeper card without shame in the years since, even threatening to let migrants make their way to Europe if his Syrian and other regional ambitions are not recognised. 

By gradually outsourcing migration management to Africa and the Middle East in exchange for money and political support, Europe is both enabling a far more brutal handling of asylum, which would be out of place in the eyes of the continent from the perspective of human rights and the EU's image, and in the meantime it is also exposing itself to the blackmailing potential of the dominant local regimes. 

Europe risks compromising its human rights principles while also being forced to make serious foreign policy compromises. Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is urging the European Union to normalise its relations with Syria in order to facilitate the repatriation of Syrians. If that is possible with one of the most repressive regimes of the region, the Assad-regime, which also uses chemical weapons against its own people, it is hard to imagine that any other country would be unacceptable to make a political deal with when it comes to migration.